A collection of all-time favourite school stories Meet the world’s naughtiest boys and girls, the best and the worst students and some really famous children in this book as they make their way through school. Read about David Copperfield and his friendship with Steerforth, Tom Brown trying to find his feet in Rugby school, and Jane Eyre fighting poverty and disease in a school for orphans. Not to forget those other irrepressible and immortal boys, Richmal Crompton’s William Brown, Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer, RK Nararyan’s Swami and Ruskin Bond’s Rusty. Also included are stories from such classics as Anne of Avonlea, Little Men, Stalky and Co., and To Sir, With Love. By turns hilarious and heartwarming, these classic tales are about growing up and the time spent in that one place which is so beloved to some and so hated by others—school.

"It's 10th August, 1628. The Royal Warship Vasa is moored in front of the Stockholm Royal Palace, ready for its maiden voyage. A piglet by the name of Lindbom has just been forced on board. He realises he must escape. But how does a small pig get ashore unnoticed? A rat, a cat and a seagull tell Piglet Lindbom what to do, as he steals along the ship's every nook and cranny"--Back cover.

This book examines school and college fiction for girls in Britain and the United States, written in the first half of the twentieth century, to explore the formation and ideologies of feminine identity. Nancy G. Rosoff and Stephanie Spencer develop a transnational framework that recognises how both constructed and essential femininities transcend national boundaries. The book discusses the significance and performance of female friendship across time and place, which is central to the development of the genre, and how it functioned as an important means of informal education. Stories by Jessie Graham Flower, Pauline Lester, Alice Ross Colver, Elinor Brent-Dyer, and Dorita Fairlie Bruce are set within their historical context and then used to explore aspects of sociability, authority, responsibility, domesticity, and possibility. The distinctiveness of this book stems from the historical analysis of these sources, which have so far primarily been treated by literary scholars within their national context. Winner of the History of Education Society Anne Bloomfield Prize for the best book on history of education published in English 2017-19

What children read in the Second World War had an immense effect on how they came of age as they faced the new world. This time was unique for British children--parental controls were often relaxed if not absent, and the radio and reading assumed greater significance for most children than they had in the more structured past or were to do in the more crowded future. Owen Dudley Edwards discusses reading, children's radio, comics, films and book-related play-activity in relation to value systems, the child's perspective versus the adult's perspective, the development of sophistication, retention and loss of pre-war attitudes and their post-war fate. British literature is placed in a wider context through a consideration of what British writing reached the USA, and vice versa, and also through an exploration of wartime Europe as it was shown to British children. Questions of leadership, authority, individualism, community, conformity, urban-rural division, ageism, class, race, and gender awareness are explored. In this incredibly broad-ranging book, covering over 100 writers, Owen Dudley Edwards looks at the literary inheritance when the war broke out and asks whether children's literary diet was altered in the war temporarily or permanently. Concerned with the effects of the war as a whole on what children could read during the war and what they made of it, he reveals the implications of this for the world they would come to inhabit.

"The English girls' boarding school novel was staple reading for girls, not just in England, through the first half of the twentieth century. Generally dismissed as sentimental hack writing, these stories were immensely popular. Humphries, who had loved the books as a child, discovered in adulthood that she was still enamored of them. Her search for why the books still hold up turned into a dissertation. She concentrates on the genre as a whole, finding several important similarities. The most important ones involve the independence and strength of young women living in an all female environment. The chapters elucidate the positive messages that the books contain: a respect for intelligence and learning, women as self directed, women active in sports, women in authority and, importantly, the bonds of female friendship. Humphries makes it clear that although some attitudes have changed, too many girls still see themselves as incomplete without a boyfriend and always secondary to him."--GOOGLE BOOKS.