1924 Events January * January 12 – Gopinath Saha shoots Ernest Day, whom he has mistaken for Sir Charles Tegart, the police commissioner of Calcutta, and is arrested soon after. * January 20– 30 – Kuomintang in China hol ...

biography A biography, or simply bio, is a detailed description of a person's life. It involves more than just the basic facts like education, work, relationships, and death; it portrays a person's experience of these life events. Unlike a profile or ...

Frederick William Sanderson Frederick William Sanderson (13 May 1857 – 15 June 1922) was headmaster of Oundle School from 1892 until his death. He was an education reformer, and both at Oundle, and previously at Dulwich College where he had started as assistant master, he ...

H. G. Wells Herbert George Wells"Wells, H. G."
Revised 18 May 2015. ''

Oundle School, of which Sanderson was headmaster from 1892 to 1922. After Sanderson died while giving a lecture at

University College London , mottoeng = Let all come who by merit deserve the most reward , established = , type = Public research university , endowment = £143 million (2020) , budget = ...

at which he was introduced by Wells, the famous author agreed to help produce a biography to raise money for the school. But in December 1922, after disagreements emerged with Sanderson's widow about his approach to the subject, Wells withdrew from the official biography (published in 1923 as ''Sanderson of Oundle''; Wells wrote much of the text but the volume was published without listing an author) and published his own work separately.

Themes

For Wells, Sanderson was "the greatest man I have ever known with any degree of intimacy." Wells emphasized Sanderson's originality not only as an innovative schoolmaster, but as a social and religious thinker whose liberal view of

Christianity Christianity is an Abrahamic monotheistic religion based on the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth. It is the world's largest and most widespread religion with roughly 2.38 billion followers representing one-third of the global pop ...

emphasized the notion helping and encouraging others to live not only "abundantly" but also "dangerously." Wells embraced Sanderson's hope that schools dedicated to solving problems related to human needs and emphasizing creativeness, cooperation, and the scientific search for truth could become model institutions inspiring broader social change, and quoted at length from Sanderson's sermons and speeches on these subjects in his biography.

Reception

''The Story of a Great Schoolmaster'' was translated into Swedish and was reprinted in vol. 24 of the 1924 28-volume Atlantic edition of Wells's works, after ''Joan and Peter''.David C. Smith, ''H.G. Wells: Desperately Mortal: A Biography'' (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1986), p. 560n.29.

References

External links

* The full text of
The Story of a Great Schoolmaster
' at HathiTrust Digital Library {{DEFAULTSORT:Story of a Great Schoolmaster, The 1924 non-fiction books Books by H. G. Wells Chatto & Windus books