A 1911 Book

I am taking time out from intense dramaturgical work on our production of Pericles, scheduled for this coming weekend, to recommend a remarkable book I have just read: Mr. Perrin and Mr. Traill, by Hugh Walpole, first published in 1911. It is set in a Gothic-feeling public (to Americans, private) school in Cornwall, England, and is unusual in being about a poisonous school environment as seen not from the viewpoint of its oppressed students but from that of its mentally immured masters. Anyone feeling stuck in a job, at a school or elsewhere, will find both insight and perhaps some consolation in the book, and not only from seeing how much worse things are at Moffat’s than at your own place of work.

Quoted from http://www.bigbillkruse.com/walpole.htm: “In a preface written in 1935 [Walpole] noted: ‘The very young novelists of 1910 all felt that they must tell the truth about life or perish in the attempt... Mr Perrin remains as one of the early realistic novels at the beginning of the realistic period from 1910 to 1930.’”

The book seems to be out of print, though two used copies are available from Amazon. If enough people start asking for it, perhaps it will be reprinted.