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Novelists as Schoolmasters

Aspiring writers have often tried their hand at teaching.  They have usually assumed that it would be an undemanding ...

Set up as a representative of an ideal which is all toffee, invested in an authority which has absolutely no base except in the teacher’s own isolate will, he is sneered at by the idealists above and jeered at by the materialists below, and ends by being a mongrel, with every shred of natural pride ground out of him.” The hero Paul Pennyfeather must teach fifty or sixty boys ranging from ten to eighteen Classics, English, Maths, German and French, as well as competitive athletics, carpentry, fire-drill and music, all for £120 per year. In that novel the repellent suburb is filled with “labyrinths of meanly decent streets, all so indistinguishably alike”, and the school (like Lawrence’s) is in “a dark-looking, semi-detached house of yellow brick, three storeys high.” Mrs. Creevy, Dorothy Hare’s employer in the wretched Ringwood (echoing the disease ringworm) Academy for Girls, aged fifteen to eighteen, is a grotesque version of the tight-fisted, unscrupulous proprietor of The Hawthornes.

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