 8th
March 2003 - Review of Ian Anstruther's most
recent work from - The
Spectator - London
Boys will be boys
Juliet Townsend
DEAN FARRAR AND
‘ERIC’
By Ian Anstruther
Haggerston Press, £19.95, pp.131,
ISBN:1869812190
I have always been grateful that I first read
Eric, or Little by Little at the age of nine,
when I was able to take it completely seriously.
Not for me the attitude of the cynical
M’Turk in Stalky & Co, who, when faced
with a moral dilemma, said mockingly, ‘We
don’t want any beastly Erickin.’ I
travelled hand in hand with Eric on every step of
his downward path — from his early days with
‘bright blue eyes and noble face’ to
his final degradation ‘fair hair matted and
tangled, eyes sunken, dead and lustreless’
— sinking inexorably into an early grave.
John Betjeman, who loved Victorian school
stories, wrote in Summoned by Bells:
Those few
who read Dean Farrar’s Eric now
Read merely for a laugh, yet still for me
That mawkish and oh-so-melodious book
Holds one great truth — through every
page there runs
The schoolboy sense of an impending
doom…
Well it might. Even in the
laissez-faire world of the early Victorian
boarding school, when at Eton it was considered
acceptable to lose one boy every two years by
drowning, the mortality rate at Roslyn School
must have seemed excessive. Nowadays it would be
considered a rich field for the talents of a risk
assessment officer. Sometimes the reasons for
death seem unconvincing. Eric’s noble
friend, Russell, stranded on the rocky Stack by
the tide, ‘had sprained the knee badly and
given the tibia an awkward wrench … It was
decided the leg must be amputated.’ He
lingers for a few weeks of prayer and
exhortation, with the weeping Eric at his
bedside, ‘then there was a slight sound in
his throat, and he was dead’. One can hardly blame Eric for taking to
drink, especially when his little brother,
Vernon, falls from the cliff while birdnesting
and plunges to his doom on the rocks below. How I
sobbed while the ripples of the incoming tide
‘played softly with his fair hair as it rose
and fell … until they themselves were
faintly discoloured by his blood’.
Ian Anstruther, in his excellent introduction to
this welcome new edition, which includes the full
text of the book, casts light on many fascinating
aspects of Farrar’s life and its influence
on this books for boys. It must be remembered
that Eric was a huge bestseller, from its
publication in 1858, one year after Tom
Brown’s Schooldays, right up to the 1930s,
when it was still bought by aunts and godmothers
for boys departing for public school. By that
time it must have seemed like meeting a dinosaur
in the zoo, it is so completely out of tune with
the hearty and healthy school stories written
from the 1890s onwards. One cannot imagine P. G.
Wodehouse or John Finnemore of the splendid Teddy
Lester books wrestling with the problems of
masturbation and homosexual affairs between
schoolboys as Farrar does in only slightly veiled
form in the chapter entitled ‘Dead Flies or
Ye Shall be as Gods’, with the telling
subheading ‘In the twilight, in the evening,
in the black and dark night’. One
interesting fact which Ian Anstruther points out
is that Farrar’s attitude to these sensitive
subjects changed over the years. In the early
editions he is quite open, writing passages like:
‘But Eric was too manly a little fellow to
sink into the effeminate condition which usually
grows on the young delectables who have the
misfortune to be “taken up”…’
(by older boys). Later he toned this down,
replacing ‘effeminate’ with
‘dependant’ and ‘delectables’
with ‘foolish little boys’. He cut down
on the kissing too, and also physical contact.
Wildney, once to be found ‘quietly sitting
on Eric’s knee’, has moved in later
editions to a seat by the fire.
Anstruther points out that Farrar was an observer
and gripping storyteller without much creative
imagination. Roslyn is clearly his own school,
King William’s College, Isle of Man, with
additional material derived from his experiences
as a master at Marlborough and Harrow. Most of
the characters are based on real people, often
with barely disguised names. Eric’s own
name, Eric Williams, can be extracted from that
of his creator, Frederic William Farrar.
Certainly Farrar’s concern for sexual
morality seems to have arisen from the state of
affairs — in every sense of the word —
which he found at Harrow. A boy who was there in
the 1850s, when Eric was being written, recorded
in his memoirs ‘Every boy of good looks had
a female name, and was recognised either as a
public prostitute or as some bigger fellow’s
bitch.’ ‘Bitch was the word in common
usage to indicate a boy who yielded his person to
a lover.’ The whole situation was given a
dubious legitimacy by the fact that the
headmaster himself was having an affair with one
of the boys. Farrar veils this whole distasteful
subject in a dark mist of Evangelical obscurity:
Kibroth-Hattaavah! Many
a young Englishman has perished there! Very
pale their shadows rise before us. May every
schoolboy be warned by the waving of their
wasted hands, from that burning marl of
passion where they found nothing but ruin and
an early grave.
Although Dean Farrar’s
career as headmaster of Marlborough, Dean of
Canterbury, brilliant teacher and preacher and
distinguished theologian was never crowned by the
bishopric he felt he deserved, he was a
well-known public figure in his day. It might
have surprised him if he could have foreseen
that, exactly 100 years after his death, his fame
would rest almost entirely on a school story he
had written as ‘a very young man … to
reach the hearts of boys and serve the cause of
public-school morality’. To any who want to
sample the dark, powerful world of Roslyn School
this is an admirable introduction.
Haggerston Press, Barlavington Estate,
Petworth, Sussex GU 28 0LG, Tel: 01798 869260,
Fax: 01798 869401
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Books by Ian Anstruther: