Wednesday, April 13, 2022

What a difference a year makes............

      The ethos, whatever its general benefits was not one that the newly arrived Oscar Wilde found immediately congenital.  At nine he was almost a full year younger than the designated entrance age.  And there was little in his character that suited him to the rough-and-tumble of boarding school life.  Slight, imaginative, independent, and dreamy, he drifted to the edge of things.  He made no firm friends.  Games—the great motor of schoolboy existence—held no interest for him ("I never like to kick or be kicked," he claimed).  Work, too, at first failed to engage his energies.  He distinguished himself mainly by being hopeless in mathematics.

-Matthew Sturgis, Oscar Wilde: A Life

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