It is implied that the mischievous pranks of the boys in school were splendid training for their role as instruments of the British Empire.

[2] The novel is a compilation of nine previously published stories,[6] with a prefatory untitled poem beginning "Let us now praise famous men" (Sirach 44:1).

"[15] Other harsh criticisms have come from George Sampson in The Concise Cambridge History of English Literature, A. C. Benson, and Edmund Wilson.

He compared the boys' actions to the Black Hundreds' massacres in tsarist Russia, the Jameson Raid, and "the adventures of Sir Edward Carson and F. E. Smith (now Lord Birkenhead) in Ireland".

"[19] The stories contain a good deal of language, from slang and Devon dialect to legal Latin, that is unfamiliar to modern readers, especially those outside Britain.

Their casual talk includes Latin and French (often distorted), not unusual for schoolboys of the time, and they quote or purposefully misquote classical authors such as Cicero and Horace.

[20][16] Allusions include: Kipling wrote an additional story about Stalky and Co., "Scylla and Charybdis", that remained unpublished in his lifetime.

The manuscript was displayed at Haileybury in 1962, in an exhibition to mark the school's centenary; and in 1989, after spending many years in a bank vault, was transferred to the College archives.