The Education of an Englishman
We think in generalities, but we live in detail. To make the past live, we must perceive it in detail in addition to thinking of it in generalities. In this paper I am jotting down recollections of details and generalities of boyhood in an English school, fifty years ago.
Tolstoy has written, as the first sentence of his Anna Karenina: “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Thus what is best in English boyhood of that period is identical with what is best in New England experience, of to-day or of that period. But every nation is bad in its own way. We cannot be social reformers all the time. In our off moments we view our peculiar domestic mixture of goods and evils with an affectionate tolerance of their incongruities, which we call “humour.” So please remember in reading English literature that the humorous aspects of English life are in general minor symptoms of social defects.
Any account of a phase of national life must throw light on two things: (a) why the nation is as good as it is, and (b) why the nation is as bad as it is. If it be our own country which is in question, the combined complex fact is the country which we love, with its virtues and its defects.
Personal recollections are limited by personal experience. So these pages are not recollections of English education passim; but they ate typical of one important phase, and apart from knowledge of this phase you cannot understand how England functioned during the latter sixty years of the nineteenth century. The limitations of these recollections can be defined by a reference to Anthony Trollope. His novels refer to the grown-up members of the same society. My recollections refer to the children of the families which he writes about. The fathers of the boys were archdeacons, canons, rectors in the Established Church, or officers in the Army, or small squires in the South-West of England, or lawyers, or doctors. There was a sprinkling of boys from large commercial families.
Most of the moderate capital behind the professional families had come from commerce at no distant date. For us commerce meant trade, banking, ship-owning. Manufactures belonged to the North of England, of which our knowledge was about as vague as it was of the United States. Of course we knew about it, and it was a subject for pride as a national asset, but we did not grasp what it really meant. Anyone who comes from the North of England can reciprocate this indifference of boyhood, from the opposite end.
The school was in Dorsetshire, at Sherborne, a small town of six thousand inhabitants. At that time there were three hundred boys. We were locally termed “The King’s Scholars,” in allusion to the remodelling of the school in the sixteenth century by King Edward the Sixth. As time was
