Word: sopworth
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Dates: during 1968-1968
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...young protagonist of Sheed's feverish short novel, the equivalent of Dickens' blacking factory is a backwater English secondary school called Sopworth College. Jimmy Bannister, 15 and feckless, is suddenly uprooted from his American adolescence and packed off to Sopworth. Both menacing and seedy, Sopworth gives him an advanced course in the three Bs: boredom, bullying and befuddlement...
...summer vacation, Jimmy finds that the subjects of those slides shrink, blur and become distorted. He half realizes that he is beginning to see old friends, new cars, his father and the N.Y. Yankee., through the eyes of an English schoolboy. He decides that the world of tea and Sopworth isn't so bad after all-until his re-entry into it, when he is buffeted more harshly than ever. Crikey! Now his sensibilities are hopelessly suspended somewhere in mid-Atlantic...
...then, Sheed was enrolled in Downside, a Benedictine prep school in England somewhat resembling Sopworth in The Blacking Factory. Eventually, he took a degree in history at Oxford, spent a year with his father's relatives in Sydney, Australia ("more eccentricity per square foot than anywhere"), and settled in Greenwich Village as a writer. His first novel, A Middle Class Education (1961), earned him a small reputation that has grown slowly but steadily. Last year his fourth novel, Office Politics, was nominated for a National Book Award. Now, at 37, he is justly rated as one of the nation...
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