Early works The Governess, or The Little Female Academy by
Sarah Fielding, published in 1749, is generally seen as the first boarding school story. Fielding's novel was a moralistic tale with tangents offering instruction on behavior, and each of the nine girls in the novel relates her story individually. However, it did establish aspects of the boarding school story which were repeated in later works. The school is self-contained with little connection to local life, the girls are encouraged to live together with a sense of community and collective responsibility. Fielding's approach was imitated and used as a formula by both her contemporaries and other writers into the 19th century.
Emergence of school stories in nineteenth century School stories were a somewhat late arrival as a popular literature. Children as a market were generally not targeted until well into the nineteenth century. There was concern about the moral effect of novels on young minds, and those that were published tended to lean towards giving moral instruction.
Thomas Hughes and successors Jane Eyre (1847) by
Charlotte Brontë, and
Dombey and Son (1848) and
David Copperfield (1850) by
Charles Dickens had school story elements, which generated considerable public interest and close to 100 school stories had been published between 1749 and 1857, the year that ''
Tom Brown's School Days'' by Thomas Hughes appeared. It is perhaps the most famous of all such tales, and its popularity helped firmly establish the genre, which rapidly expanded in the decades to follow across thousands of novels. Hughes never wrote another school story: the sequel
Tom Brown at Oxford focused on university life. However, more school stories followed such as
F.W. Farrar's
Eric, or, Little by Little: A Tale of Roslyn School (1858), Revd H.C. Adams'
Schoolboy Honour; A Tale of Halminster College (1861) and A.R. Hope's
Stories of Whitminster (1873). In 1870 the Education Act paved the way for universal education for children, and so gave the market for school stories a considerable boost, which led to some publishers advertising novels specifically as school stories. Boys' magazines also began to be published which featured school stories, the best known being ''
Boy's Own Paper'', with its first issues appearing 1879.
Talbot Baines Reed Talbot Baines Reed wrote a number of school stories in the 1880s, and contributed considerably to shaping the genre, taking inspiration from
Thomas Hughes. His most famous work was ''
The Fifth Form at St. Dominic's'' (1887) (serialised 1881–82). It was reprinted on a number of occasions, selling 750,000 copies in a 1907 edition. While seated in Baines Reed's Christian values, ''The Fifth Form at St Dominic's'' showed a leaning away from the school story as instructional moral literature for children, with a greater focus on the pupils and a defined plot.
Gender difference in school stories As schools were segregated by gender in the nineteenth century, school stories naturally formed two separate but related genres of girls' school stories and boys' school stories. There had been an increase in female schooling from the 1850s, augmented by the
Elementary Education Act 1870.
L. T. Meade, who also wrote historical novels and was a magazine editor, become the most popular writer of girls' school stories in the final decade of the nineteenth century. Her stories focused on upper class pupils at boarding schools who learned to earn trust by making mistakes. They had little focus on sports and were primarily interested in friendships and loyalty. They remained largely rooted in Victorian values and preparing girls to be proper wives and mothers.
Twentieth century Most literature for girls at the turn of the twentieth century focused on the value of self-sacrifice, moral virtues, dignity and aspiring to finding a proper position in societal order. This was to a large extent changed by the publication of
Angela Brazil's girls school stories in the early twentieth century, which featured energetic characters who challenged authority, played pranks, and lived in their own youthful world in which adult concerns were sidelined. Twentieth-century boys' school stories were often comical in nature – examples being the
Billy Bunter stories and the
Jennings series. Coeducation remained rare in boarding school stories. Enid Blyton's
Naughtiest Girl series was unusually set in a progressive coeducational school. J. K. Rowlings' Harry Potter series represents a more recent example of a mixed-sex boarding school.
Decline of the school story genre The peak period for school stories was between the 1880s and the end of the Second World War. Comics featuring school stories also became popular in the 1930s. After World War II boarding school stories waned in popularity. Coeducational schools for all British schoolchildren were being funded by the public purse; critics, librarians and educational specialists became interested in creating a more modern curriculum and tended to see stories of this type as outdated and irrelevant. School stories have remained popular, however, with a focus shifting towards state-funded day schools with both girls and boys, and dealing with more contemporary issues such as sexuality, racism, drugs and family difficulties. The
Bannerdale series of five novels (1949–56) by
Geoffrey Trease, starting with
No Boats on Bannermere, involved two male and two female pupils of day schools in the
Lake District, and a widowed mother. Trease was inspired to set the series in a day school following a letter from a young reader complaining that, despite being the setting for many school stories, boarding schools were in fact no more exciting environments than day schools. This is something remarked upon by the narrator. The
Harry Potter series of novels has in some respects revived the genre, despite having a strong leaning towards
fantasy conventions. Elements of the school story prominent in
Harry Potter including the action being described almost exclusively from the point of view of pupils. ==Elsewhere==