ShmoopTube

00:02

Lots of the action in the Harry Potter books takes place at Hogwarts, a [witch casts spell]

00:06

magical British boarding school that just happens to have the same name as a

00:10

debilitating skin condition that runs rampant in the swine community. Sad... Well, [sad warty pig]

00:16

the Harry Potter books definitely weren't the first ones to be set at a [boarding school literature timeline]

00:19

British boarding school. It's a tradition that goes all the way back to Thomas

00:23

Hughes' 1857 novel, Tom Brown's School Days. And believe it or not, the history of the

00:28

British boarding school goes back even further--all the way back to the 14th

00:32

century. We're talking pre-invention of the printing press. You might not be a [printing press diagram]

00:36

huge fan of having to read the textbooks you get in school, but it's a lot better [student asleep in class]

00:39

than having to copy your own. A whole bunch of boarding schools were founded

00:43

in the Middle Ages, including Eton, Winchester, Harrow, and Rugby, and they [schools pictured]

00:48

kept going for centuries. But by the 19th century, some people were starting to

00:52

worry that these places were becoming sites of moral decay... Not to be confused [school collapses]

00:56

with molar decay, which is potentially even more distressing. Sure, the kids at [scary dentist lady]

01:01

these boarding schools we're learning some Greek and some Latin, but when they [angelic students]

01:04

weren't in class, they could be real monsters, rioting and terrorizing the

01:08

local townsfolk. And when a bunch of kids burn down your home, you don't really [angelic students burn down village]

01:11

care how well they translate Latin. So in 1828, when Thomas Arnold became the

01:16

headmaster of Rugby, he made a bunch of reforms to the school to turn these wild [disciplined students]

01:19

boys into proper gentleman. Stuff like emphasizing Christian values, giving

01:25

prefects more of a disciplinary role, and putting the boarding houses under the

01:28

guidance of teachers. Not exactly the recipe for a wild party. It was this kind

01:33

of 19th century boarding school that was the setting for Tom Brown's School Days, [book pictured]

01:37

the story of an 11-year-old boy who triumphs over his bullies, developing

01:42

into a good-hearted moral young man. Well, he didn't have a lightning bolt scar, but [not-Harry Potter pictured]

01:46

he might as well have. Although such stories might seem relatively simple,

01:50

they sold really well, kicking off a craze of similar tales. Part of J.K. [books fly off shelves]

01:54

Rowling's success came from picking up the baton of the British boarding school

01:57

story and running with it in a more magical, more

02:01

wand-centric direction. Whether we read one of those initial school stories or the [Rowling uses story structure]

02:05

recent Harry Potter books, the story structure is surprisingly similar. We see [book comparison]

02:10

young people learning from their encounters with bullies, friends, and

02:13

teachers slowly but surely developing into the upstanding citizens British [students develop]

02:17

boarding schools were meant to produce. Of course, only a select few of those

02:21

young people have to fight a powerful evil wizard intent on killing them. [Harry Potter fights Voldemort]

02:25

Spoiler alert: it ain't Tom Brown.

Full Transcript