Sociologically Interesting!

Clearly, boys who will shortly be attending a “public school” constituted the intended audience for this book published in 1857. Often, they are addressed directly, in a fatherly tone … that some may have considered paternalistic.

It reads more like a memoir than a novel and tells of the years spent by the title character in Rugby, the school attended by the author and his brother some two decades earlier. In fact, the plot is very linear, and the characters are little developed and somewhat flat.

Read two centuries later and in another continent, the book reflects a foreign, by-gone era, all-boys boarding schools having practically disappeared. Thus, the book’s interest is largely sociological. Two things are most striking: corporal punishment, that is now considered as anything but pedagogical, and team sports, a major British contribution to modern world culture that is very often not appreciated as such.

In the audio version, Hugh Bonneville does an outstanding job with narration as he manages to bring to life the whole work, including descriptions of cricket matches that may nevertheless be abstruse to many.

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