Explore "The Upton Letters" by A.C. Benson on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
MY DEAR HERBERT, -- I have been wondering since I wrote last whether I could possibly write a school story. I have often desired to try. The thing has hardly ever been well done. Tom Brown remains the best. Dean Farrar's books, vigorous in a sense as they are, are too sentimental. Stalky & Co., as I said in my last letter, in spite of its amazing cleverness of insight, is not typical. Gilkes' books are excellent studies of the subject, but lack unity of theme; Tim is an interesting book, but reflects a rather abnormal point of view; A Day of My Life at Eton is too definitely humorous in conception, though it has great verisimilitude.
In the first place the plot is a difficulty; the incidents of school life do not lend themselves to dramatic situations. Then, too, the trivialities of which school life is so much composed, the minuteness of the details involved, make the subject a singularly complicated one; another great difficulty is to give any idea of the conversations of boys, which are mainly concerned with small concrete facts and incidents, and are lacking in humour and flexibility.