Thomas Hughes' Tom Brown's School Days is a famous book. Goodbye Mr. Chips is another, made into a film with Peter O'Toole and Petula Clark.
Enid Blyton wrote two boarding school series, Malory Towers and St. Clare's.
Boarding schools or "public schools" (although they are private) are much more numerous in the UK than in North America.
England and Wales has a state boarding school system, providing the state education but charging for boarding.
Boarding school living provides opportunities to make life long friends (and enemies too I suppose!).
This picture is of St. John's House Museum which was once used as a hospital and boarding schools.
I remember children I knew in my teens who attended boarding school and they missed their families terribly. Yet, others did not. Family dynamics can be complex. Some kids I knew missed their parents but not their siblings.
Others seemed to come from a "us vs Them" family with distant parents.
The boarding school genre makes for great story telling.
And the fantasy world of Harry Potter at Hogwarts makes the most of it!
