Rudyard Kipling's book Stalky & Co. is about young men attending a British boarding school. Three young main characters in this collection of school stories have a smug, cynical attitude toward authority and patriotism. After the stories were featured in periodicals for the preceding two years, it was first published in 1899. Part I of ""Slaves of the Lamp."" Mr. King interrupts the three boys while they are practicing a pantomime of ""Aladdin"" because he has discovered jokes Beetle wrote about him. When the younger child who taught King the poems is there, he drags Beetle into his study and corrects him. Stalky gets an intoxicated carter to throw stones at King by shooting him with a catapult. In ""An Unsavoury Interlude,"" Mr. King makes fun of Beetle for once being frightened to take a bath in the ocean, which causes the boys from Mr. King's house to call the boys from Mr. Prout's house ""stinkers.""Many lads take part eagerly in order to train for their future professions as military officers. But when a member of parliament is asked to speak at the school on ""patriotism,"" he angers the lads by raising the Union Jack. The cadet corps left the next morning under Stalky's leadership. The majority of Kipling's characters, who are now about thirty, are soldiers or civil officials in India.

Limits and Renewals, Kipling's last collection of short stories, was written shortly after the death of his only son. Dark and penetrating in tone, these are brilliant portraits of a soul in torment with some welcome relief coming in the tales of 'Aunt Ellen' and 'The Miracle of Saint Jubanus'.

Kipling's Imperial Boy opens by examining the significance of boyhood in the evolution of European modernity. Chapter one shows how closely the figure of the adolescent (the 'boy') is associated with questions of imperial expansion and consolidation. The chapters that follow take up Rudyard Kipling's fiction of the imperial boy, emphasizing the imaginative link between adolescence and cultural hybridity and offering detailed readings of The Jungle Book, Stalky & Co ., and Kim.

Stalky, M'Turk and the Beetle are the trio who conduct a battle of wits with masters and school fellows alike in these tales of school life.

A surprising number of classic English authors wrote school stories, from Mary Shelley and Maria Edgeworth through Evelyn Waugh and Stephen Spender. Coverage spans two centuries of fiction set in the endowed private schools called Public Schools in England. Famous works such as Tom Brown's Schooldays by Hughes and Stalky & Co. by Kipling are described, along with books of accomplished but lesser-known writers such as Charles Turley, Eden Phillpotts, Talbot Baines Reed, and Desmond Coke. In addition to their pure entertainment value, these novels preserve a wealth of cultural information: class attitudes, sexual development, sports history, consciousness of Empire, role of the Established Church, study of the Classics. Biographical sketches are provided for most of the authors.