English Public Schools
Although Mr. Chips's Brookfield is a fictional place, it is based on real English public schools, such as Eton and Harrow, which have been enormously influential in England for hundreds of years. ("Public" schools are actually what Americans would call private schools, and serve chiefly upper-class and well-to-do boys, and, more recently, girls.) The culture that has grown up around the English public school system is mythic. Its values, ideals, and traditions have been embraced, envied, admired, and copied in much of the world -- although its elitism and sometime cruelty have also been detested and derided.
In his 1977 book, The World of the Public School, George MacDonald Fraser writes, "For better or worse, the public schools have had a hold on Britain for close to two centuries. They have trained most of the men and many of the women who run the British government, armed forces, civil service, church and commerce. They have influenced every aspect of Britain's national life -- and, through the old Empire, a sizeable part of the world as well."
By 1880, the year Chips comes to Brookfield, public schools were firmly established as the main system for educating upper-class boys. These kinds of schools were chiefly boarding schools, and each had its own traditions, slang, rituals, and unwritten codes to which its boys adhered religiously. According to historian Vivian Ogilvie in his book, The English Public School, public schools of the higher rank (such as Eton and Harrow), were quite similar in that all
had developed a set of characteristics which were rapidly vested with an aura of antiquity. There was a system of boarding houses, run by masters. There was the system of prefects and fags. The headmaster and house masters ruled through their prefects and, by treating them as responsible semi-adults, gave them a useful preparation for manhood. The organization of a school's corporate life and the maintenance of discipline outside school hours by the older boys, with a minimum of interference from the master, came to be regarded as an essential and differentiating characteristic of the Public School.