The 1990s seemed an unlikely time for the traditional school story to stage a comeback. The genre was unfashionable and sneered at by critics who found the idea of setting children’s book in a private boarding school ridiculous, since most of the population would never have seen one, let alone attended it. The Tracy Beaker stories by Jacqueline Wilson, whose main character lives in the care of social services because of her mother’s violent boyfriend, seemed to far more with the prevailing attitudes towards children’s fiction.
The most famous exponents of the traditional school story had all dropped away: Elinor Brent-Dyer had died in 1969, leaving one posthumous work to be published, and Enid Blyton had stopped her St. Clare’s and Malory Towers series in the early fities, long before her death in 1968. Anthony Buckeridge was still alive, but the last Jennings books, Jennings at Large, had been published in 1977. The St Trinians parody films had slipped into a series of sub-Carry On embarrassments, and any new novel with “boarding school” in the title seemed more likely to appear on the top shelves of “adult fiction” than the children’s department.
Reports of the school story’s demise had been greatly exaggerated, however. Though few new works were being produced, Anne Digby had started her Trebizon series in the late seventies, and continued through the next two decades. The back catalogues of The Chalet School, Jennings and St. Clare’s were still selling well. So well, in fact, that the nineties saw a flurry of commissions from publishers who wanted new school stories in the old formats. Macmillan, who had been publishing paperback editions of Jennings, approached Anthony Buckeridge and persuaded him to write two more Jennings books. Chorion, the company who bought the rights to Enid Blyton’s backlist, employed Pamela Cox and Anne Digby to write more works in the St. Clare’s and Naughtiest Girl in the School series respectively. Digby ended up writing six more Naughtiest Girl books, double the number in the original series!
The end of the nineties also brought the beginning of one of the greatest phenomena publishing had seen in a long time: the Harry Potter series. And for all the wizardry and mythology in Harry Potter, they were set in an old boarding school, and employed many of the familiar convention to be found in the series already mentioned. Government policy even seemed to be moving towards the image of school stories, with Tony Blair suggesting at one point that organising state schools into the “house system” familiar from the old-fashioned novels, might improve pupils’ performance.
Whatever caused the revival in school stories, it has been a dramatic chapter in the recent history of children’s literature. It is probably fair to say that fifteen years ago, very few people would have thought that the most popular genres of fiction these days would be traditional fantasy and traditional boarding school stories!
