Parkhurst Boys, and Other Stories of School Life

Stories of an English public school as the boys tell them: the football matches, the boat races, the paper-chases, the bullying and the quarrels that take a term to settle. Talbot Baines Reed wrote for "The Boy's Own Paper" and was a typefounder by trade — he also wrote the standard history of English letter-founding. His schoolboys argue about justice more than about games, and the argument is the point. Fifty-nine plates bring the wider nineteenth-century world to these school stories, from Wilkie's crowded gatherings to Holland's river and street scenes.