This is another story set in a nineteenth century boy’s boarding school, and is quite similar to "The Fifth Form at Saint Dominic's". In case you are alarmed by the title, it only means that the book is about the best House in the school.

At the time it was greatly acclaimed, and said to be very like a real boarding school, but things must have changed because I was at one such school only fifty years after this book was written, and I can't imagine any of it happening at my school. On the other hand I was also at a boarding school for boys aged 8 to 13, which was much more like the school in this story. As I say, things must have changed.

It takes about ten hours to play as an audiobook. There are a number of quite tense incidents, particularly when a party of boys decide to walk up a nearby mountain, and the weather turns very nasty. This is in chapters 17 to 19. But there are many other well-described incidents, so do read the book, remembering that boys' slang has changed greatly in the past hundred years.

REED, Talbot Baines (1852-93). English author of books for boys, born in London, the son of Sir Charles Reed (1819-91), chairman of the London School Board. He became head of his father's firm of typefounders, and wrote books on the history of printing (such as History of the Old English Letter-foundries (1887). His robust, moral, but entertaining school stories first appeared in the Boy's Own Paper. They include The Fifth Form at St. Dominic's (1881), The Master of the Shell (1887), and Cockhouse at Fellsgarth (1891).

A PDF of scans and an HTML version of this book are provided. We also provide a plain TEXT version and full instructions for using this to make your own audiobook. To find these click on the PDF, HTML or TXT links on the left.

These transcriptions of books by various nineteenth century authors of instructive books for teenagers, were made during the period 1997 to the present day by Athelstane e-Books. Most of the books are concerned with the sea, but in any case all will give a good idea of life in the nineteenth century, and sometimes earlier than that. This of course includes attitudes prevalent at the time, but frowned upon nowadays.

We used a Hewlett-Packard scanner, a Plustek OpticBook 3600 scanner or a Nikkon Coolpix 5700 camera to scan the pages. We then made a pdf which we used to assist with editing the OCRed text.

To make a text version we used TextBridge Pro 98 or ABBYY Finereader 7 or 8 to produce a first draft of the text, and Athelstane software to find misreads and improve the text. We proof-read the chapters, and then made a CD with the book read aloud by either Fonix ISpeak or TextAloud MP3. The last step enables us to hear and correct most of the errors that may have been missed by the other steps, as well as entertaining us during the work of transcription.

The resulting text can be read either here at the Internet Archive or at www.athelstane.co.uk