The Beginning of the End

Beverley Nichols’s school novel Prelude marked the end of the publication of children’s literature by key founders of the Order of Chaeronea and BSSSP. Nichols’s novel was reviewed in the final collective Uranian publication, and his own bad review of Bradford’s final collection of poems may have been partly responsible for discouraging Bradford from further publication and ending the Uranian movement. While he only wrote poetry late in life many decades after the end of the Uranian movement, Nichols nonetheless has been associated with the Uranians. The ways Nichols departs from the conventions of earlier Uranian school novels—Howard Sturgis’s Tim (1891) and John Gambril Nicholson’s In Carrington’s Duty-Week (1910)—indicate why the strategies of the Uranians, Order of Chaeronea, and BSSSP were increasingly becoming outdated. Nichols represents an unashamedly effeminate schoolboy named Paul who pursues openly romantic friendships with two schoolmates. Like Nichols himself, Paul remains unapologetic about his effeminacy and love for boys and determines to climb the ranks of the school and win the esteem of his peers, which he succeeds in doing while demonstrating the heroic ideals championed by Uranian thinkers. Nichols’s school novel represents the beginning of a shift to a more openly gay children’s literature for the modern age .