Plot summary

Lord Dismiss Us is set in an English boys' public school in the 1960s.
The novel deals with the love affair between two boys, together with the internal politics of the school itself. Carleton, a sixth form

Sixth form

In the education systems of England, Wales, and Northern Ireland, and of Commonwealth West Indian countries such as Barbados, Trinidad and Tobago, Belize, Jamaica and Malta, the sixth form is the final two years of secondary education, where students, usually sixteen to eighteen years of age,...

er loves Allen, a boy two years his junior. At the same time the headmaster is trying to enforce a policy against such liaisons.

At the time of writing it was a contemporaneous work. As such it now depicts a school at a period in history. It was published in the same year that homosexuality between consenting adults was legalised in the UK

Sexual Offences Act 1967

The Sexual Offences Act 1967 is an Act of Parliament in the United Kingdom . It decriminalised homosexual acts in private between two men, both of whom had to have attained the age of 21. The Act applied only to England and Wales and did not cover the Merchant Navy or the Armed Forces...

.

The author, Michael Mussen Campbell, b. 1924, was the grandson of the 1st Lord Glenavy and brother of the 3rd Baron, the humorist Patrick Campbell. He was a Dubliner who attended St Columba's school and Trinity College. Lord Dismiss Us was apparently based on the suicide of a St. Columba’s schoolmaster.

Briefly a barrister at the Irish bar, Campbell worked in London for the Irish Times. His other novels included Peter Perry (1956), a ‘story of Dublin Theatrical Life’, and Oh Mary, This London (1959), a fantasy set in London, and Across the Water (1959).

Michael Campbell succeeded his brother Patrick in 1980 to become the 4th and last Lord Glenavy. He never married, dying in 1984.