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The position of the family as the child’s probable first environment meant that novels in other genres might well begin as domestic fiction; the opening chapters of iconic texts such as Treasure Island (1883), The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, and Peter Pan (1911) all take place in the home, and often the action ends there too. Yet the genre closest to the domestic novel may be the school story. Many family sagas, from Coolidge’s Katy books to the Australian Mary Grant Bruce’s Billabong series (1910–1942), contain episodes or even entire novels set in schools, and in some cases these schools may be indistinguishable from the home. Alcott’s Little Men (1871), for instance, takes place in the school founded by Jo and her husband in the home inherited from Jo’s aunt, and since the pupils include Jo’s sons, her niece and nephew, and her husband’s nephews, it is difficult to say where family child-rearing leaves off and education begins. Indeed, Allison Speicher (2017) has identified a mini-genre consisting of American children’s tales featuring romances between schoolboys and their female teachers, a pattern that extends the “discipline powered by love” (2011, p. 15) that Joe Sutliff Sanders examines in North American Golden Age texts about orphan girls.

The English-language school story began in the eighteenth century with Fielding’s The Governess, the first full-length English novel for children. The school described here is tiny, private, and homelike; the pupils are essentially temporary sisters, and proprietress Mrs. Teachum privileges socialization over academics. Yet when we think of the nineteenth-century British school story, we are likely to contemplate works set in boys’ schools, from Harriet Martineau’s The Crofton Boys (1844) through Thomas Hughes’s Tom Brown’s Schooldays (1857), Frederic Farrar’s Eric, or Little by Little (1858), and Talbot Baines Reed’s The Fifth Form at St. Dominic’s (1881), to Rudyard Kipling’s Stalky & Co. (1899). From the 1880s through the 1930s, British children’s publishing witnessed a flood of boys’-school stories encouraged by factors including the new centrality of athletics to public schools’ character-building agenda and the founding of boys’ magazines such as the Boy’s Own Paper (BOP). Designed to attract middle-class boys as much as their poorer brethren, the BOP was a major forum for public-school fiction, as were rivals such as The Captain: A Magazine for Boys and Old Boys (1899–1924).

Certainly, nineteenth-century stories for girls might also have school settings. Burnett’s Sara Crewe, or What Happened at Miss Minchin’s (expanded into A Little Princess in 1905 after the success of a stage adaptation) was serialized in St. Nicholas in 1887, and L.T. Meade (Elizabeth Thomasina Meade Smith) helped to shape the girls’-school story with the publication of A World of Girls: The Story of a School in 1886. But in part because attendance at boarding schools was less usual for well-to-do girls than it was for their brothers, the girls’-school story for younger readers was less prominent in the late nineteenth century than the girls’-college novel for adolescents, a form that gained energy from the anxieties surrounding women’s higher education as a phenomenon that some observers considered likely to jeopardize marriageability and even fertility. As a genre, then, the girls’-school story is primarily a twentieth-century form, with works such as Angela Brazil’s first published book, A Terrible Tomboy (1905), serving as early examples. Both school and college novels from this period often assert that far from being rendered unfeminine by learning, girls can retain or improve their domestic virtues through education; series following the heroine through school, such as Pauline Lester’s Marjorie Dean novels (1917–1926), may present marriage as the saga’s final installment.

Typical boys’-school stories focus less on the schools’ homelike qualities (although these qualities are present) than on how pupils achieve citizenship, a point that critic Jenny Holt (2008) emphasizes. While American tales such as Owen Johnson’s Lawrenceville Stories (1909–1922) don’t always follow this pattern, the classic British school story shows its hero confronting bullies or false accusations of wrongdoing, thereby gaining the manly qualities that he will need in the wider world. Manliness in this genre is a process, and even in the sunniest tales, that a given boy will develop it is by no means certain. As a genre, boys’-school stories acknowledge that masculinity embraces many possible roles, some of them undesirable.

This tension between good and bad manhood helped make the nineteenth-century school story foundational for boys’ literature more generally; works as apparently distant from this form as Jack London’s dog story The Call of the Wild (1903), Robert A. Heinlein’s science fiction adventure Space Cadet (1948), and Sabaa Tahir’s young adult fantasy An Ember in the Ashes (2015), among many others, owe something to its conventions. As this list suggests, American writers may have been particularly ready to assign to other genres some of the developmental preoccupations characteristic of the school story in Britain. Here we might point especially to the American entrepreneurial novel for children, best exemplified by the work of Horatio Alger, Jr. In novels such as Ragged Dick (1867–1868), the street serves the same function as the academy in British boys’-school stories: both provide opportunities for young protagonists to demonstrate manliness, overcome hostile figures, and “graduate” to adult status. Similarly, Mark Decker (2017) argues that classic American “bad boy” fictions, notably Thomas Bailey Aldrich’s The Story of a Bad Boy (1870) and Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer sequence (1876–1896), showcase the boys’ development of the traits needed for success in the managerial classes; although school plays a relatively minor part here, boys nonetheless face challenges that enable them to hone qualities prized by the national culture, just as Tom Brown does at Rugby. For boys positioned outside the mainstream by geographical location (Tom Sawyer), early acculturation (Kipling’s Kim), or social class (Ragged Dick), school and larger world are one.