Set in an eternal Edwardian England that might even be pre-1914, the Billy Bunter series is still fun to read as long as you accept this is the humour and the social mores of a long-gone Britain, a time capsule of a certain social class of a century ago, the sort of place that Wilfred Owen might have had in mind when sitting in a trench in France writing poetry.
Yes, even in its day this was quickly-written hack writing and wasn't intended to be Literature. It wasn't even intended for posterity, just as infill for weekly periodicals, meant to be ephemera. The result is somewhat crude as writing and afflicted by cardboard plots and two-dimensional characters.
A century on, however, it has its charm as a period piece, a historical relic of an almost-vanished Britain. As social history, they implicitly tell us about the finer gradations of the British class system. Greyfriars, a very minor public school where the staff appear to be absolutely aware they're not employed at Eton or Harrow or Ampleforth and are gloomily aware those schools are at the other end of the prestige scale. The boys they teach also reflect their appropriate social strata: these are the sons of businessmen and industrialists with only a scattering of very minor nobility. (The central character, the appalling Billy Bunter, is the son of a tradesman, an industrial chemist).
Bunter, a larger-than-life character, makes the tales work; so exaggerated and over-the-top that he becomes a caricature, but a fixed point around whom the other boys orbit, united if only by their disdain of him. Mr Quelch is the caricature of the disappointed older teacher who sees retirement looming up on his personal horizon as a full stop on a mediocre life. Quelch is a dystopian Mr Chips, waiting for the "Goodbye".
Greyfriars is one of the fixed points of the English boarding school genre; quite possibly part of the background reading from which Hogwarts emerged with its time-mellowed building, school rules, school culture and the House system. And not only Hogwarts: the Discworld has its echoes too, in the Assassins' Guild School, the Quirm College for Young Ladies (Billy had a sister, Bessie, at her own public school), and the appallingly spartan Hugglestones' Academy. Greyfriars lives on in modern writings. Forget it's 2023 and step back a hundred years. The books still have a charm and an indefinable something about them.
Literature I say, you chaps!
Set in an eternal Edwardian England that might even be pre-1914, the Billy Bunter series is still fun to read as long as you accept this is the humour and the social mores of a long-gone Britain, a time capsule of a certain social class of a century ago, the sort of place that Wilfred Owen might have had in mind when sitting in a trench in France writing poetry.
Yes, even in its day this was quickly-written hack writing and wasn't intended to be Literature. It wasn't even intended for posterity, just as infill for weekly periodicals, meant to be ephemera. The result is somewhat crude as writing and afflicted by cardboard plots and two-dimensional characters.
A century on, however, it has its charm as a period piece, a historical relic of an almost-vanished Britain. As social history, they implicitly tell us about the finer gradations of the British class system. Greyfriars, a very minor public school where the staff appear to be absolutely aware they're not employed at Eton or Harrow or Ampleforth and are gloomily aware those schools are at the other end of the prestige scale. The boys they teach also reflect their appropriate social strata: these are the sons of businessmen and industrialists with only a scattering of very minor nobility. (The central character, the appalling Billy Bunter, is the son of a tradesman, an industrial chemist).
Bunter, a larger-than-life character, makes the tales work; so exaggerated and over-the-top that he becomes a caricature, but a fixed point around whom the other boys orbit, united if only by their disdain of him. Mr Quelch is the caricature of the disappointed older teacher who sees retirement looming up on his personal horizon as a full stop on a mediocre life. Quelch is a dystopian Mr Chips, waiting for the "Goodbye".
Greyfriars is one of the fixed points of the English boarding school genre; quite possibly part of the background reading from which Hogwarts emerged with its time-mellowed building, school rules, school culture and the House system. And not only Hogwarts: the Discworld has its echoes too, in the Assassins' Guild School, the Quirm College for Young Ladies (Billy had a sister, Bessie, at her own public school), and the appallingly spartan Hugglestones' Academy. Greyfriars lives on in modern writings. Forget it's 2023 and step back a hundred years. The books still have a charm and an indefinable something about them.