Although barely out of adolescence…[Shelley] was, in 1813, an ardent radical and anti-monarchist. Physically, he was rather odd,...
Although barely out of adolescence…[Shelley] was, in 1813, an ardent radical and anti-monarchist. Physically, he was rather odd, tall and slim to the point of limpness, with a high-pitched effete voice; but what he lacked in physical bulk he more than made up for in charismatic intensity. Among the earliest witnesses to this intensity were his school fellows at Eton, where he was sent by his landowning father when he was twelve. Initially he was bullied for his refusal to ‘fag’ for older boys, but the bullies soon discovered that in spite of his feeble frame, Shelley was not a boy to succumb quietly to taunts. On the contrary, he could be terrifying when roused, and was quite capable of reciprocal acts of violence. He stabbed one tormentor’s hand with a fork, and others remembered him as an almost unearthly creature, with flashing eyes, wild hair, and deathly white cheeks.
young romantics - daisy hay (via revolutionariess)
#i saw ‘shelley stabbed someone with a fork’ and knew i had to share with the world
that’s it. that’s Romanticist scholarship.
(via marygodwinning)
Could someone please explain what “to fag” means in this context?
(via talkinggorillabutler)
The student bodies of British boarding schools had internal hierarchies - think of Prefects and the Head Boy/Girl in Harry Potter - and part of this involved upperclassmen taking personal charge of younger students as servants/mentees. This would include the younger boys performing petty chores for the older, one of the more common of which was gathering and carrying bundles of firewood - that is to say, faggots - from whence the name, fagging, with the younger boys as fags.
“Ha ha a more innocent time” except no, this is where the slang for men who have sex with men comes from, it was common knowledge that the older boys would often use their faggot boys for sex or abuse them for sport, sexually or otherwise.
The conditioning process of character-building institutions often begins with a period of abuse, to shatter an acolyte’s existing personality and render them pliable in preparation for the construction of a new one - consider the way that military training begins at boot camp with drill instructors insulting recruits and assigning them impossible tasks so they can be punished for failing.
With male elites this hazing process has often included a catamite dynamic - consider also the citizens of ancient Greece or Rome, cabin boys in the Royal Navy, more recently the Catholic priesthood, Hollywood, and the BBC.
