Certainly Farrar's concern for sexual morality seems to have arisen from the state of affairs - in every sense of the word - which he found at Harrow. A boy who was there in the 1850s, when Eric was being written, recorded in his memoirs 'Every boy of good looks had a female name, and was recognised either as a public prostitute or as some bigger fellow's bitch.' 'Bitch was the word in common usage to indicate a boy who yielded his person to a lover.' The whole situation was given a dubious legitimacy by the fact that the headmaster himself was having an affair with one of the boys. Farrar veils this whole distasteful subject in a dark mist of Evangelical obscurity:

Kibroth-Hattaavah! Many a young Englishman has perished there! Very pale their shadows rise before us. May every schoolboy be warned by the waving of their wasted hands, from that burning marl of passion where they found nothing but ruin and an early grave.
Although Dean Farrar's career as headmaster of Marlborough, Dean of Canterbury, brilliant teacher and preacher and distinguished theologian was never crowned by the bishopric he felt he deserved, he was a well-known public figure in his day. It might have surprised him if he could have foreseen that, exactly 100 years after his death, his fame would rest almost entirely on a school story he had written as 'a very young man É to reach the hearts of boys and serve the cause of public-school morality'. To any who want to sample the dark, powerful world of Roslyn School this is an admirable introduction.

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