Tim: A Story of School Life

Young Tim, whose father is disappointed in him, forms a close friendship with an older boy, for whom his father conceives a strong dislike. A four-year difference in age prevents the boys from maintaining a close friendship at Eton but does not diminish their affection. When the older boy graduates and discovers the girl of his dreams, he unbosoms his love agonies to his childhood confidant. To appreciate Tim's response, a reader must realize, as Tim himself begins to do when his friend is leaving Eton, that his love for him is, as the narrator suggests, "wonderful, passing the love of woman." The sexual component of this emotion, although obscure to the child, is apparent to his tutor, who ignores “much of what he knew, and the whole of what he suspected." (More than this oblique acknowledgment of homosexuality, especially in the case of a child, could scarcely have appeared in print in 1891.) The focus of the later chapters shifts between Tim’s damaged relationship with his father and his awkward new relationship with his rapidly maturing friend, until they are harmonized in a bittersweet ending. (Summary by Thomas A. Copeland)