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.
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