Word: blackinger
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THE BLACKING FACTORY and PENNSYLVANIA GOTHIC, by Wilfrid Sheed. A polished novella and a long story-both about adolescence-emphasize the consequences of failing to let go of the past.
For the young protagonist of Sheed's feverish short novel, the equivalent of Dickens' blacking factory is a backwater English secondary school called Sopworth College. Jimmy Bannister, 15 and feckless, is suddenly uprooted from his American adolescence and packed off to Sopworth. Both menacing and seedy, Sopworth gives...
THE BLACKING FACTORY and PENNSYLVANIA GOTHIC by Wilfrid Sheed. 246 pages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $5.50.
When Charles Dickens was twelve, his debt-hounded family yanked him from school and sent him to work in a ratty London warehouse where blacking paste was made. His ordeal lasted only a few months, then he returned to school. But, as Wilfrid Sheed notes in a preface to this...
By then, Sheed was enrolled in Downside, a Benedictine prep school in England somewhat resembling Sopworth in The Blacking Factory. Eventually, he took a degree in history at Oxford, spent a year with his father's relatives in Sydney, Australia ("more eccentricity per square foot than anywhere"), and settled...