The term was later applied to any novel that traced the personal development of a single individual, usually a youth. Susanne Howe elaborates on such stories in the introduction to Maugham's novel. Typically, the adolescent hero of the Bildungsroman "sets out on his way through the world... falls in with various guides and counselors, makes many false starts choosing his friends, his wife, and his life work, and finally adjusts himself... by finding a sphere of action in which he may work effectively" (Howe in Maurice Maugham, p. xii). The Bildungsroman was an extremely popular literary form during Maugham's time. Other prominent examples of this kind of novel include Charles Dickens's David Copperfield (1850), D. H. Lawrence's
Sons and Lovers (1913; also covered in Literature and Its Times), James Joyce's
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916; also covered in Literature and Its Times), and Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain (1924).
Educational reform in nineteenth-century England. Throughout the middle ages, elementary English education was under the complete control of the church (Cruickshank, p. 1). At the secondary level and at England's two universities (Oxford and Cambridge), religion had long been regarded as the basis of all education, and the curriculum remained relatively fixed, with emphasis given to moral philosophy, mathematics, and classical studies.
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