Novel · A way to begin
To Sir, With Love
E. R. Braithwaite · 1959
Synopsis
A black engineer from British Guiana and a former RAF airman, Ricky Braithwaite cannot find any job in postwar London, where employers refuse to hire him because of his colour. On the advice of a stranger, he becomes a teacher at an East End school, before half-illiterate adolescents who will soon leave school and try to discourage him with noise and provocation. He decides to treat them as adults, to let them choose what they will study and to demand their respect in return.
Context
The book was published in London in 1959 by Bodley Head and draws on the years its author spent at the school of St George-in-the-East, in Wapping. The film James Clavell made of it in 1967, with Sidney Poitier, moved the story to the London of the sixties and made it famous around the world; the author thought it too sentimental, regretted that his hero's romance was given less space in it, and declared in 2007 that he hated it. The French translation appeared as early as 1964 at La Table ronde.
Who it is for
A short autobiographical narrative, in twenty-two chapters, accessible without preparation; the film softens its tone.
Prizes and reception
Anisfield-Wolf Award and an immediate success; in 2022 it appears among the seventy Commonwealth books chosen for the Queen's jubilee.
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