Tarts

The Tarts are a group of younger boys in the House social hierarchy at Wyvern, identified by C. S. Lewis as pretty, effeminate-looking pupils who formed relationships with older boys, usually Bloods. Their position combines intimacy with status: Lewis describes their relationships as often lasting and sentimentalized, and their standing as carrying unofficial influence and privileges. In his account, they belong to the school’s elaborate social order, but do not represent its deepest harm; that, he argues, lies in the pervasive struggle for advancement.

Place in Wyvern’s hierarchy

Lewis introduces the Tarts during his first evening at the Coll. A group of young boys looked into the New Boys’ Study, smiled at the recruits, and withdrew; one voice joked about what the visitors were trying to find. Lewis understood the encounter because his brother had briefed him on Coll manners. The visitors were the House’s reigning or fading Tarts, trying to guess which new boys might become their rivals or successors.

Wyvern’s social divisions operated at two levels, the Coll and the House. A boy could be a Coll Blood or only a House Blood, a Coll Punt or only a House Punt, and likewise a Coll Tart or only a House Tart. The distinction made the Tarts’ status relative: their position depended on the circle in which they belonged, within a school where the Bloods held the strongest authority and prestige.

Relationships and social standing

Lewis characterizes a Tart as a small, pretty, effeminate-looking boy who acted as a catamite to one or more older pupils, usually Bloods. He notes that the arrangement was not invariably confined to Bloods. In his description of the school’s social conventions, relationships with boys below the Bloods’ elite were not treated as a serious breach of the code that governed the privileged group.

The relationships, as Lewis presents them, were generally solicited rather than imposed, and could persist over time. He distinguishes them both from slavery and from prostitution: they were not described as compelled service or paid in cash, and they were often sentimentalized rather than simply sensual. The Tarts could receive flattery, unofficial influence, favor, and privileges, in a pattern Lewis compares to the social advantages enjoyed by the mistresses of powerful men. He also contrasts Wyvern with the account of Harrow in Arnold Lunn’s Harrovians: there, he says, Tarts acted as informers, whereas Wyvern’s did not. One of Lewis’s friends shared a study with a minor Tart; apart from sometimes being asked to leave when the boy’s lover visited, the friend had no complaint.

Reputation, routine, and Lewis’s response

Lewis recalls that the subject saturated House conversation. From week to week, boys whispered, hinted, and speculated about who had a case with whom, whose standing was rising, who possessed whose photograph, and the timing and place of encounters. After games, gallantry became the principal topic of polite conversation. The circulation of gossip made the Tarts’ relationships part of everyday social knowledge, rather than a private matter separated from the school’s status system.

Lewis says he was not shocked by the system, but found it boring. He reports that he had never been tempted by the practice and still found it opaque to his imagination. He speculates that a longer stay at the Coll might have made him more like the school’s expected normal boy, but as things stood he remained bored by this part of its culture. His account thus sets his personal indifference against the attention the House devoted to the subject.

The Tarts and the school’s social order

Lewis connects the Tarts’ place at school to Wyvern’s advertised role as preparation for public life. Their relationships brought not only intimacy but unofficial influence, favor, and privilege, reproducing in miniature the social arrangements of adult society. At the same time, the Tarts were not themselves the ruling group: the Bloods combined athletic distinction, school authority, special liberties, and the hero-worship of younger pupils. The Tarts’ standing existed within that broader hierarchy.

In Lewis’s retrospective judgment, the school’s essential evil was not either the suffering of fags or the arrogance of Bloods, and he refuses to give pederasty first place among the Coll’s evils. The more pervasive damage came from the social struggle to rise or retain one’s position, which encouraged flattery of superiors, cultivation of useful acquaintances, abandonment of unhelpful friendships, and participation in attacks on unpopular boys. His portrait of the Tarts is therefore both a description of a particular school subculture and part of a wider account of how status-seeking shaped conduct at Wyvern.