The Promise of Very Bad Boys

“In summer all right-minded boys built huts in the furze-hill behind the College–little lairs whittled out of the heart of the prickly bushes, full of stumps, odd root-ends, and spikes, but, since they were strictly forbidden, palaces of delight. And for the fifth summer in succession, Stalky, McTurk, and Beetle (this was before they reached the dignity of a study) had built like beavers a place of retreat and meditation, where they smoked.”

This, the first paragraph in Rudyard Kipling’s book Stalky and Company, reveals a great deal about what is to follow. The stories in the book are set in an English public school; the boys who attend this school are fond of breaking the school rules; and three boys in particular — Stalky, McTurk, and Beetle — surpass the other boys in bad behavior and daring. They smoke. Just for starters.

Stalky and Company was published in 1899. It recounts the pranks played by Stalky, McTurk, and Beetle on their hapless masters at a British public school. The masters are no match for the boys’ ingenuity and rapidity of execution, as when they lure a hated master into being arrested for trespassing, or plant the pungently decaying corpse of a cat in the ceiling of the common room of a rival “form” — some of whose members had suggested that the three pranksters were paying insufficient attention to person hygiene.

The reviews of the book were mixed. H.G. Wells called the three boys “mucky little sadists.” Henry James thought the book “deplorable.” Teddy Roosevelt said that it was a book “which ought never to have been written, for there is hardly a single form of meanness which it does not seem to extol, or of school mismanagement which it does not seem to applaud.” Other reviewers, remembering what it was like to be a boy, commended the stories’ humor and realism.

The reviewer who called out the stories’ realism was not far wrong, for Stalky and Company is a semi-autobiographical tale of the adventures of Kipling and two close friends when they were students at a preparatory school that specialized in educating boys for jobs in the civil service and the army.

“Stalky” is the knick-name of a character based on a real person named Lionel Dunsterville. The knick-name means clever in the way that Odysseus was clever. Stalky in later life served in the army, and became a brilliant soldier.

Reginald (or Reggie) Beetle, is a bespectacled boy with a literary bent, based on Kipling himself.

William “Turkey” M’Turk (pronounced McTurk) is heir to a landed estate in Ireland. Normally quiet and modest, he can, to further the pranks of the group, affect the grand seigneur. His character is based on George Charles Beresford.

My favorite among the stories is “Regulus”, about a Latin class taught by a master named King. The class is working its way through the fifth ode of the third book of odes by the Roman poet Horace. Kipling prefixes to the story the following historical note:

Regulus, a Roman general, defeated the Carthaginians 256 B.C., but was next year defeated and taken prisoner by the Carthaginians, who sent him to Rome with an embassy to ask for peace or an exchange of prisoners. Regulus strongly advised the Roman Senate to make no terms with the enemy. He then returned to Carthage and was put to death.

We are no doubt right to assume that the following classroom exchange is drawn from life:

‘Beetle, the translation of _delubris_, please.’  [King speaking]

Beetle raised his head from his shaking arm long enough to answer: ‘Ruins, sir.’ 

There was an impressive pause while King checked off crimes on his fingers. Then to Beetle the much-enduring man addressed winged words: 

‘Guessing,’ said he. ‘Guessing, Beetle, as usual, from the look of _delubris_ that it bore some relation to _diluvium_ or deluge, you imparted the result of your half-baked lucubrations to Winton who seems to have been lost enough to have accepted it. Observing next, your companion’s fall, from the presumed security of your undistinguished position in the rear-guard, you took another pot-shot. The turbid chaos of your mind threw up some memory of the word “dilapidations” which you have pitifully attempted to disguise under the synonym of “ruins.”‘ 

As this was precisely what Beetle had done he looked hurt but forgiving. ‘We will attend to this later,’ said King. 

One of the boys in the class is found guilty of infraction of the rules and receives a caning as punishment. He accepts his fate without protest, like Regulus returning to Carthage because honor requires it. King, supposing this to be a sign that Horace has gotten through to at least one of his students, is delighted.

The last story in the book gives a glimpse of the horrid three in adult life — all of them grown into respectable responsible maturity, each of them an honor, in his own way, to Queen, country, and empire. That there is irony here was hard to miss, but what exactly was the point of the irony? Is it that looks deceive, and that the worst boys are really eggs that will hatch good citizens? Or is it that the very badness of bad boys, surviving in discreet form into their adulthood, is what makes them of such great service to their sovereign and empire? The latter possibility disturbed many readers and left them with a bad taste more unpleasant than the stench of a putrid cat in the ceiling of a form’s common room.

These stories are really awful and a heck of a lot of fun to read.