James Brooke-Smith's Gilded Youth explores the resilience of public schools in Britain from the late eighteenth century to the present day. In particular, Brooke-Smith seeks to explain why this group of elite schools still has “such a powerful grip on our social institutions and cultural imagination” (10). Brooke-Smith's answer, and the focus of this timely and often amusing literary study of “rebellion” among the privately educated, is that public schools generated dissent amongst their pupils as much as they forged conformity to dominant values. Brooke-Smith suggests that these forms of “upper-class counterculture” (17) frequently reproduced, or were compromised, by the privileges—mostly of class, but also often gender—that underpinned public school education. Protests were often piecemeal, not necessarily serious threats to the status quo. For instance, the “transgression” (65) of rebellious public schoolboys in novels like Tom Brown's Schooldays—petty theft and casual violence—is eventually overcome. This meant that the public school was a recurrent fixture of popular culture in modern Britain. Memories of public schooling were marked not only by “nostalgia” but also by “anger” (191). This also ensured that many public school malcontents still found themselves in influential positions once they had left, even if it meant taking a less conventional path to their peers. Eventually, public schools themselves were spurred to rework their values and educational practice—closely intertwining “modernity and tradition” (241) in their appeals to parents in the late twentieth century. In the process, Brooke-Smith suggests, these institutions retained their power even as many people turned to criticize inherited privileges.

Gilded Youth offers a valuable picture of distinctly upper-class, mostly male and white, forms of youth culture. These forms of youth culture were distinctive for often being stamped by the unusual experience of sleeping in dormitories and reading in Greek and Latin. But the book is also a useful account of the complexities of elite formation in modern Britain. Building on recent sociological research, Gilded Youth provides some suggestive explanations for the endurance of class inequality over the last two hundred years.

Brooke-Smith adopts an expansive definition of public schools. It includes most schools that are now referred to as “independent.” A large proportion of Brooke-Smith's examples come from residential institutions. But this, matched with his broad definition of public schools, ties into some of his arguments in the book's final, substantive chapter, in which he discusses some recent anachronistic representations of private education. Brooke-Smith suggests that they focus criticism, erroneously, on the most outdated aspects of public schools—and Gilded Youth can be fruitfully read as an account of the changing values projected by public schools as much as a study of those pupils who rejected them. With this nuanced study of the interplay between these pressures, Brooke-Smith seeks to expose “the strains in the system and its potential for collapse” (14).

Gilded Youth is structured roughly chronologically. It begins with the conservative public school “rebellions” of the late eighteenth century, whose aim, Brooke-Smith argues, was preserving a degree of pupil autonomy. The book's main focus, however, is on the consequences of the shift away from these “violent struggles between boys and masters” toward the later, more private, “forms of subcultural dissent” symbolized by, among others, Percy Bysshe Shelley (49). Shelley, known as the “Eton Atheist,” read widely at school, including “radical political philosophies” (44), inspiring successive generations of rebels. The following chapters deal with the consequences of the tussle between the nineteenth-century pressure for “moral seriousness and spiritual vocation” (61) and the desires of many public school students for alternative identities. These provide a wide-ranging succession of neat case studies: the public school novel; flagellation fantasies; the writing of “nonsense” in ancient languages; aestheticism; political subversion; and pop culture. A final section continues the story up to the present and the marketing of public schools to a global audience. Brooke-Smith offers some case studies that fit the book's overall framing better than others—for example, the material on communism is a particularly strong illustration of the circumscribed nature of adolescent protest in public schools. Overall, Gilded Youth seems to indicate the strength of public schooling far more than its vulnerability. Throughout, Brooke-Smith offers compelling literary portraits of various public school malcontents. Some are familiar choices; many are not.

Indeed, one of the achievements of Gilded Youth is to highlight the diffusion of a range of different ideas about public schools into various different sites of British culture beyond “boarding school fiction” (12). This is joined in Brooke-Smith's account—to pluck out two examples—by John le Carré's novels and the band Genesis. By highlighting how diversely public schools have been represented, Brooke-Smith implicitly offers an explanation for their enduring power. However, with so much wide-ranging material, the specific claims that Brooke-Smith makes about the actual reception of these ideas among the broader public—rather than just among the products of private education—are more limited. Future work might do more to explore demotic ideas about the injustices (or not) of private education, and how and whether popular feelings about the “old school tie” changed over such a long period, when access to education greatly expanded.

Most of Brooke-Smith's sources for pupil experiences of the public school counterculture are published novels, memoirs, or biographies. It would be interesting to know what any surviving disciplinary records, for instance, suggest about the contemporary experiences of pupils who did not subsequently rise to positions of public prominence (they might also reveal something about an aspect of the “upper-class counterculture” that could have received more attention in Gilded Youth: drugs). But Brooke-Smith's focus on these individuals is entirely sensible given Gilded Youth's concern to explain the endurance of elite educational institutions. Gilded Youth helps make sense of an important part of this story—but it is also important as a contribution to the literature on class and youth culture in modern Britain.