The Molesworth series by Geoffrey Willans and Ronald Searle is a cult classic: part school story, part satire, part gothic novel and part social comedy. The books, (entitled Down With Skool!, How To Be Topp, Whizz for Atomms and Back in the Jug Agane) are narrated by the schoolboy anti-hero Nigel Molesworth, whose prose style is idiosyncratic in the extreme. For example:
History began with a lot of barons who opresed everbode. Then they became respectable and agreed king john was going too far. Thou mayest have the body they cried so he signed magna carta in xchange. When king john had got the body he didn’t kno what to do with it of course. He ort to hav put a gun in its hand and make it appere like suicide chiz like in the detective stories.
Molesworth is the antidote to all the school story heroes like Tom Brown and The Boy From The Blue: whilst they are noble, upstanding, virtuous and hardworking, Molesworth is cynical, philistine, devious and occasionally disarmingly camp. Philip Hensher (in his introduction to the Penguin Classics Collected Molesworth) compares the schoolboy’s attitude with the Angry Young Men, such as John Osborne and Kingsley Amis, and he certainly has their irreverence, energy and invention. There is also a comparison to be made with George Macdonald Fraser’s Flashman series, which take the villain of Tom Brown’s Schooldays, and give him his own set of novels. Both protagonists are engagingly amoral and far more interesting to read about than the earnest heroes of many other school stories.
The Molesworth series do far more than simply reverse a set of conventions, however. They are exhilaratingly funny, relating life as “St. Custard’s School” in a prose style which combines parody, satire, dramatic misspellings and oblique cultural references so skilfully that it almost constitutes a new dialect. Perhaps it is his eccentricity of style which has prevented Molesworth from being filmed (unlike contemporary novels such as Lucky Jim and Titus Groan) with directors despairing of recreating either his speeches, or the world which is seen through their gloriously distorting lens.
Molesworth’s style is a strangely catchy style, as well: I have found people using Molesworth’s slang in an Oxford seminar and an article on British foreign policy in The Times, for example. Like Amis and Osborne, Molesworth may have found himself adopted at the heart of the British establishment which he spent so much energy and flair on mocking.
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