Dr. Joliffe's Boys; A Tale of Weston School

Dr. Joliffe's Boys; A Tale of Weston School

Author: Lewis Hough (1830-1900)

Year: 1883

This a very enjoyable book about life in a boy's boarding school in the late nineteenth century. Despite school-rules, the boys get out of bounds for a number of reasons, for instance visiting a forbidden tuck shop; engaging in various cruel country sports, like rat baiting; going skating on a frozen lake, especially near the thin ice; poaching on a large nearby estate; and suchlike attractions. Every scene is beautifully drawn, and I have wondered many times why the author did not write more, and indeed why this book is not more well known than it is. Until I found a copy in an old book shop I had never heard of either the author or of the book. The characters of the various principal actors in the story are very well drawn, and one feels one knows them all quite well by the end of the book. Lewis Hough, an Englishman who was probably born in the third or fourth decade of the nineteenth century, became an expert in Sir Isaac Pitman's new invention, phonography—better known today as Pitman shorthand. He wrote a number of stories in that script which were printed as exercises for students. They were printed by lithography. He also wrote a number of boys' books which enjoyed success.