Black Gate

St. Trinian’s: The Entire Appalling Business (Overlook/Rookery, March 13, 2008). Cover by Ronald Searle

St Trinian’s was first created in a series of magazine cartoons in the 1940s and 1950s. Ronald Searle began drawing them in 1941, with a long hiatus while he was a prisoner of war in Southeast Asia. Most of them were set at an English boarding school for girls, and the rest showed characters who attended it. The Entire Appalling Business collects all of them in a single volume.

Boarding schools are a long established subject for English storytellers, from Tom Brown’s School Days, an autobiographical novel by Thomas Hughes set at Rugby, to the Harry Potter novels. Most portrayals take them fairly straight, staying within the traditional strictures of boys’ books — or girls’ books, as in this case. But there’s also a more subversive tradition, as in the Kipling stories that were collected as Stalky and Co. Searle’s cartoons are very subversive; that’s the whole point of the joke.

Most of the St Trinian’s girls are children rather than adolescents (some later cartoons show sixth form girls who are visibly more mature, particularly the recurring character Angela Menace). However, many scenes show them smoking — usually cigarettes, but occasionally cigars, and one panel refers to pot — or drinking beer, wine, or spirits. There are also references to gambling, particularly betting on horses or on school athletic events.

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