Winchester College was founded in 1382 and is one of England's oldest schools. This publication includes essays on fifty objects from across these collections, each written by a member of the school community. Winchester College was founded in 1382 and is one of England's oldest schools. Over the past six centuries it has accumulated remarkable collections of documents, books and works of art. This publication includes essays on fifty objects from across these collections, each written by a member of the school community. It features documents and artefacts from the early history of the College, and outstanding items from its important collections of Greek antiquities, Chinese ceramics, English silver, and rare books. Among the more unusual and unexpected objects are a ship model made by 18th century prisoners, a scrapbook from the Crimean War, and perhaps the world's longest running scientific experiment. An introductory essay describes how the collections were acquired and sets them in the context of the school's history.

The British public school is an iconic institution, a training ground for the ruling elite and a symbol of national identity and tradition. But beyond the elegant architecture and evergreen playing fields is a turbulent history of teenage rebellion, sexual dissidence, and political radicalism. James Brooke-Smith wades into the wilder shores of public-school life over the last three hundred years in Gilded Youth. He uncovers armed mutinies in the late eighteenth century, a Victorian craze for flagellation, dandy-aesthetes of the 1920s, quasi-scientific discourse on masturbation, Communist scares in the 1930s, and the salacious tabloid scandals of the present day. Drawing on personal experience, extensive research, and public school representations in poetry, school slang, spy films, popular novels, and rock music, Brooke-Smith offers a fresh account of upper-class adolescence in Britain and the role of elite private education in shaping youth culture. He shows how this central British institution has inspired a counterculture of artists, intellectuals, and radicals—from Percy Shelley and George Orwell to Peter Gabriel and Richard Branson—who have rebelled against both the schools themselves and the wider society for which they stand. Written with verve and humor in the tradition of Owen Jones’s The Establishment: And How They Get Away With It, this highly original cultural history is an eye-opening leap over the hallowed iron gates of privilege—and perturbation.