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This is a rare achievement - a book that ends where all other books on the subject begin! Before Tom Brown traces 2000 unexplored years of the school story, unearthing forgotten texts and manuscripts, and re-writing literary and educational history. This readable, scholarly, and meticulously researched book is truly remarkable in its range and originality. Robert Kirkpatrick, independent scholar, is one of a kind. - Peter Hunt, Professor Emeritus in Children's Literature, Cardiff University, Adjunct Professor, Dublin City University. Robert Kirkpatrick's Before Tom Brown is an erudite and informative history of the school story in English children's literature filling a silence not broached by others. It will be an invaluable source for researchers and those generally interested in the field. An essential read. - Professor Jean Webb, Director of the International Forum for Research in Children's Literature, University of Worcester    

1.""This is a rare achievement - a book that ends where all other books on the subject begin! \i Before Tom Brown \i0 traces 2000 unexplored years of the school story, unearthing forgotten texts and manuscripts, and re-writing literary and educational history. This readable, scholarly, and meticulously researched book is truly remarkable in its range and originality. Robert Kirkpatrick, independent scholar, is one of a kind."" - Peter Hunt, Professor Emeritus in Children's Literature, Cardiff University, Adjunct Professor, Dublin City University. 2. ""Robert Kirkpatrick's Before Tom Brown is an erudite and informative history of the school story in English children\rquote s literature filling a silence not broached by others. It will be an invaluable source for researchers and those generally interested in the field. An essential read."" - Professor Jean Webb, Director of the International Forum for Research in Children's Literature, University of Worcester. 3. ""Robert Kirkpatrick is one of, if not the leading authority on the history of school stories, and here in a wide-ranging display of research, he traces the development of the genre as far back as the Sumerians and Greeks, while also examining such unusual sources as the Anglo-Saxon Aelfric and our own Geoffrey Chaucer. A readable and impressive work."" -Dennis Butts, Former Chairman of the Children's Books History Society. 4. ""This is a much-needed and highly detailed collecting and drawing together of threads from disparate sources. Yes, perhaps there is not much here that is startlingly new, and the whole is not riddled with trendy or controversial theory (hurrah!) but the fact is no one has ever done this important job before and no one else was likely to do so. The author's breadth of relevant reference is impressive. Like all good works, Robert sets the scene for a potential sequel with a focus on Dickens and his contemporaries. Please, sir, can we have some more?"" - Jonathan Cooper In Children's Books History Society Newsletter no 138, pp31-32, April, 2024. 5. ""Finally, a word must be said about the organization and structure of the book. Kirkpatrick places each work or cluster of related works under an easily identifiable heading, and then narrates the plot of each story or novel, focusing on retelling the events rather than on in-depth literary analysis. For this reason, the book seems to be designed primarily as a reference work, one that will be particularly useful in acquainting both scholars and students with lesser-known texts. In sum, the book is a valuable addition to the growing corpus of critical works exploring an ever-widening range of school narratives."" - Elizabeth Gargano in Children's Literature Association Quarterly, Volume 49, Number 1, Spring 2024, pp. 110-112.

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Robert J. Kirkpatrick is the author of several books on children's literature, including The Encyclopaedia of Boys' School Stories (2000), From the Penny Dreadful to the Ha'penny Dreadfuller: A Bibliographic History of the Boys' Periodical in Britain 1752-1950 (2013) and The Men Who Drew for Boys (and Girls): 101 Forgotten Illustrators of Children's Books 1844-1970 (2019). He is a long-standing member of the Children's Books History Society (and the Society's Secretary since 2010), and has twice won the Society's Harvey Darton Award.

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