Gunpowder Treason and Plot, and Other Stories for Boys — Story, Setting & Ideas

Setting and Voice Across Three Authors

The three authors employ distinct narrative voices. Avery’s Devon story uses a colloquial, almost oral tone: “Old Dan Mudge, fisherman, of Brixham, Devon, saw a curious sight.” Whishaw’s Russian tale adopts a more formal, folkloric register, with phrases like “the barin was placed in position” and references to an ikon and moujiks. Townshend’s desert story, from the brief excerpt, appears to use a more direct, action-oriented style. The settings are geographically diverse—coastal England, rural Russia, the Sudanese desert—but each is rendered with specific local details: the “lifebuoys, held apart by thick wire zigzags” in Devon; the “snowy surface of the land” and “wolf track” in Russia; and the implied heat and sand of the Sudan. This variety means the collection offers more than the school stories the catalog subjects might suggest.

Recurring Motifs: Foundlings, Loyalty, and Moral Choice

Two stories explicitly involve foundlings or orphans. In “When Friends Fall Out,” the twin babies are abandoned at sea and adopted by the community. In “The Wolfman,” the hunter Volkitch was raised by a wolf—his “foster-mother”—creating a bond that conflicts with his master’s orders. Both tales hinge on loyalty: the Brixham villagers pool money to advertise for the babies’ parents; Volkitch refuses to kill a wolf out of filial piety. The lord’s threat to shoot the wolf himself forces a confrontation between human authority and natural kinship. These moral dilemmas are presented without easy resolution—Volkitch’s “wolfish and wicked” look suggests suppressed anger. The school stories, by contrast, likely treat loyalty in the context of team sports or honor codes, as hinted by titles like “In Honour Bound” and “The Cock-House Cup.”

The Catalog’s Emphasis on Schools vs. the Actual Range

The Project Gutenberg catalog assigns the subjects “Schools — England — Juvenile fiction” and “Adventure and adventurers — Juvenile fiction.” However, of the five stories listed in the contents, only two—“In Honour Bound” and “The Cock-House Cup”—are explicitly school stories. The other three are set outside England entirely or in a non-school English setting. “When Friends Fall Out” is a maritime foundling tale; “The Wolfman” is a Russian folk-inflected drama; “Lost in the Soudan” is a desert survival story. The title story, “Gunpowder, Treason, and Plot,” may involve historical or school elements, but its placement in the contents suggests it is not the dominant mode. Readers expecting a collection of English school adventures will find a broader, more varied anthology that draws on adventure tropes from multiple continents and traditions.

The excerpts show that the collection’s unity comes less from setting or theme than from a consistent interest in boys facing tests of character—whether at sea, in a wolf-haunted forest, or on a playing field. The three authors’ different styles reward attention to shifts in tone and detail. Readers may wish to compare how each writer handles the motif of the outsider or the moral dilemma, and to note that the school stories, while present, are not the whole of the book.

I remember shelving Gunpowder Treason and Plot beside the older volume, Stories of Heroic Deeds for Boys and Girls Historical Series - Book II — Text and Context, and noticing how both carry boys through danger—the foundling twins and the young heroes alike—each quiet step toward courage leaving the same warm dust on the shelf. Familiar old friends, those pages.