Jeremy At Crale; His Friends, His Ambitions And His One Great Enemy

This 1927 work is the third and final in Walpole’s Jeremy series. (The others are Jeremy and Jeremy And Hamlet.) Jeremy’s home is in Polchester, a fictional English cathedral town in Walpole’s imagination. In this book Jeremy goes to boarding school.

“Jeremy at Crale [1927] has been my single attempt at a school-story. The genre is not an easy one for the very simple reason that a school-story can be only truly written by a boy who is still at school. It is all very well for us to say that we remember, but the things that we recall are for all of us the same things. There is the further difficulty that the sentiment of a boy's life is compounded of elements very dangerous and difficult for analysis…. The fact is that boys are both little beasts and little heroes, that the age of puberty is the terror of parents and headmasters, and that no one dares to speak frankly, even in these frank days, of what everyone knows to be true. However, these are dangerous matters….” (Walpole) - Summary by Hugh Walpole and david wales