A Visit to Eton

Summary

“A Parliamentary return of all that is taught at Eton during ten years of pupilage in the nineteenth century, ought (if anything can) to surprise the public into some uneasiness on the subject.”

Edinburgh Review, Jan., 1845.

It is a singular spectacle for an American to see numbers of youths eighteen or nineteen years old, who in his own country would call themselves and be called young men, leaders of fashionable society perhaps—going about in boyish costume, and evidently in the status of boys. What increases the singularity of the appearance is that the Englishman's physical development is more rapid than that of the American—of the Northern States, at least; thus the Etonian of nineteen is as old in appearance as the New Yorker or Bostonian of twenty-one. They all wear white cravats and black beavers; caps are forbidden, otherwise there is no uniformity of costume, and the juvenile round jacket is as common as the manly coat upon strapping young fellows nearly six feet high. Still, however you may dress persons of that age, it is not possible to confine them entirely to the discipline of boys; the upper forms will walk out into the town of Windsor, and should one of them meet a tutor he takes refuge in a shop, the tutor, by a long established fiction, making believe not to see him.