|
|
by E.J. Burbury
Written in 1854 the novel is subtitled "a tale of school boy life" and dedicated to the headmaster of the Royal Free Grammar School of Shrewsbury.
The novel tells the story of the Towers family after the head of the household Doctor Towers dies without making adequate financial provision for his family. It depicts life without money, at a time when only charity eased the burden of raising a family in poverty. It also tells of the resourcefulness of women and children in times of difficulty.
After the death of her husband Mrs. Towers is left with
a miserable income on which to support, clothe, and educate her four children as befitted the sons and daughters of a gentleman.
Lawrence, the eldest son, is just thirteen years old, but
child as he was in years, in resolution and endurance he was a man. He had already laid out a plan for himself...College, college, to go eventually to college. To gain a Fellowship; by its means to support his darling mother and sisters.
It also tells of his mother's plan to supplement her income:
She next made an arrangement with florists in Birmingham and Wolverhampton to receive weekly all the flowers she could gather, which she sent by the night coaches on the evening of the days preceding the markets; then all her spare vegetables and fruit she sold to the market people who called with their great baskets in the bright summer mornings soon after sun was up.
Mrs Burbury comments:
England is eminently a land of charity. She is also, it is true, a land of speculation and money worship, and for these last sins, she is often heavily visited by those terrible commercial panics which spread such dismay and ruin.But she goes on to praise the "greatest blessing"--Free Grammar Schools, in which
sons of the poorest burghers have the same opportunity to gain the highest places as those of the richest man in the county, who sends his sons as boarders to the Master's House.
And so begins the story of Lawrence and his brother Wyndham, and their time at the Free Grammar School of Bury (renamed from Shrewsbury for the benefit of the story) in which various schoolboy incidents happen to test the brothers and their fellow schoolmates--trials and tribulations, school boy mischief, blackening of character's names, expulsions, all neatly tied up by the end of the novel. Lawrence is at last seen passing his last examination with "distinguished success," which allows him to continue "working up his way as steadily at the bar, as he did at school and at college."
A sample chapter of The Grammar school boys is available on this website.
The full text can also be read online or downloaded free of charge. It is in XHTML format, like this page. Please note the file size is 297kb and it may take some time to open-up if you choose to read it online. Downloading for reading later may be the preferred option and this can be typically achieved by calling up an option box. If you have a mouse and it is configured for left click to select, right clicking the link may give you this option. Link to the full text of The Grammar school boys.
Page created 12 April 2002 and last updated
12 April 2002
For your literary enquiries and comments please see the Who to contact page.
Please read the general terms and conditions and about accessibility on this site, including the use of the UK government accesskeys system. Further details on ICRA labelling, visitor counts and EnrichUK may be obtained by following these external links:-
|
|