Almost always execrated by boy readers and critics alike in the later Victorian period, the Rev. Frederic William Farrar (1831-1903) was a schoolmaster and author of the moralistic tale Eric, or Little by Little (1858) about a boy who goes to the bad. Both the Greek quotation and the note "Sixteenth Edition" on this title-page for his follow-up, St. Winifred's or the World of School, show his acceptability to the parents and others who purchased school novels as gifts or prizes, long after schoolboys made a mockery of his strangely-compelling works.