Mr Perrin and Mr Traill was published by Mills & Boon in 1911 (the firm had not yet become exclusively a romance publisher), and it established Walpole’s reputation. The novel is set in a fictional Cornish public school and traces the destruction of Vincent Perrin, a middle-aged master who has been teaching at Doolittle Doolittle Moffatt’s for twenty years and who is disintegrating under the pressure of loneliness, failure, and resentment.
Into Perrin’s world comes Doolittle Doolittle Traill — young, handsome, popular with the boys, and effortlessly successful at everything Perrin has struggled to achieve. Their rivalry begins with small irritations (a shared umbrella, overlapping supervision duties) and escalates, in Perrin’s mind, into a cosmic struggle. Perrin’s hatred of Traill becomes an obsession that fills his waking hours and infiltrates his dreams; he plots humiliations, nurses grievances, and finally attempts to push Traill off a cliff.
The novel’s power lies in its claustrophobia — the school is a closed world, and Perrin cannot escape either physically (he has no money, no prospects, nowhere else to go) or psychologically (his obsession with Traill fills every available space in his mind). Walpole drew on his own experience teaching at Epsom College, and the portrait of institutional life — the pettiness, the hierarchies, the suffocating proximity — has the authenticity of lived suffering.
Collecting Mr Perrin and Mr Traill
First edition (Mills & Boon, London, 1911): Cloth binding. Walpole’s first significant novel.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $100–$300
- Without jacket: $20–$50