The Life and Times of a Victorian Country Doctor, a portrait of Reginal Grove, Volume 2 Life at Boarding School

This is the second volume of a trilogy describing the life of Reginald Grove, a country doctor, who began his medical career in the late Victorian period after training at Guy’s Hospital, London. It draws on contemporary accounts of social life in a period of massive change in education, science, medicine, sport, railways, communication, agriculture, and religion.

This volume vividly describes his life at boarding school from aged eight to eighteen. The fictional life of Victorian boarding schools is well known from Dicken’s description of Dotheboys Hall, in ‘Nicolas Nickleby’ featuring the sadistic Headmaster, Wackford Squeers to Thomas Hughes’s ‘Tom Brown’s School Days’, remembered chiefly for the brutish bully, the infamous Harry Flashman, at Rugby School.

But there are very few accounts based on true life. This is one of them.

Using his diaries and other contemporary documents, it portrays his life as a chorister at King’s College Chapel Cambridge, and then at Uppingham School under the great Victorian Headmaster, Edward Thring. The brutality described in the fictious accounts is replaced by a more balanced portrait of school life describing lessons in the classics, sports and games, punishments, the battle for moral purity, sixth form privileges and the friendships that he made.

The author, Peter Flower, is an historian with an interest in Victorian and Edwardian England.